Fintan O’Toole: Ministers not only corrupted but stupefied by power

If this is how they behave over a minor embarrassment, imagine what they would do for a real scandal. Faced with the tiniest of challenges, Leo Varadkar and Simon Coveney fired off the big guns of political perfidy. What made them so trigger-happy?

It’s no surprise that, when they’re caught doing something outrageous, politicians will lie. They will destroy records. They will ignore the Constitution and break the law.

But what makes the saga of Katherine Zappone’s aborted appointment as a special representative to the United Nations so bewildering is that it is, on the Richter scale of political scandals, a sparrow fart.

To adapt the adage that encapsulates chaos theory, a sparrow releasing a tiny burst of mildly noxious air somewhere in the vicinity of the UN building on East 42nd Street in New York set off a riot of misconduct at the highest levels of Fine Gael.

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The attempt to appoint Zappone without any due process or transparency was bad. It is important that it was called out.

But it made those of us who have been writing for decades about Irish political shenanigans feel like Vietnam vets: you weren’t there, man, for Charlie Haughey stealing the money raised for Brian Lenihan’s liver operation, or Michael Lowry’s awarding of the second mobile phone licence, or Bertie Ahern’s dig-outs.

As strokes go, this one was barely a gentle caress.

Dealing with it should have been crisis management 101: tell the truth, say you’re sorry, act humble for a few weeks, move on. A firm of political handlers would have given it to an intern as work experience.

Yet the supposed party of law and order has taken this little episode of haughty carelessness and turned it into an epic of lawlessness. It is not unusual in the history of scandals for the cover-up to be worse than the original offence, but here the disproportion between the core issue and its political ramifications is dizzying. The tiny seed has become a jungle of evasions and high-handed disdain.

Contempt for Constitution

So far, we appear to have three very serious breaches of law or of political order: open contempt for the Constitution; the misleading, deliberately or otherwise, of an Oireachtas committee; and what seem to be multiple breaches of the law.

First, Zappone’s intended appointment was leaked from a Cabinet meeting that was still in progress, allegedly by a Fine Gael Minister. Article 28 of the Constitution, as amended by the people in 1997, decrees that “The confidentiality of discussions at meetings of the Government shall be respected in all circumstances” except where a court or tribunal of inquiry rules that there is “an overriding public interest” in doing otherwise.

The supposed party of law and order has taken this little episode of haughty carelessness and turned it into an epic of lawlessness

Second, on August 31st, Coveney was asked by John Brady at the Oireachtas Committee on Foreign Affairs, “When did the Minister notify the Tánaiste he had been in conversation with Katherine Zappone?”

Coveney answered: “To be perfectly honest, he [Varadkar] was not involved in these discussions. I did not involve him in them. The only time I briefed him in any detail was in advance of bringing this matter to Cabinet.”

At the very least, that first sentence is completely inaccurate. We know from the text messages between Zappone and Varadkar that the Tánaiste was indeed involved in the discussions for quite some time before the Cabinet meeting. Even if this falsehood was, on Coveney’s part, inadvertent, its effect was to mislead the committee and the public.

Records destroyed

Third, Varadkar’s office responded to a request under the Act for the text messages: “The record concerned does not exist or cannot be found after all reasonable steps to ascertain its whereabouts have been taken.” Neither of these claims was true – the texts were on the Tánaiste’s phone.

Coveney, meanwhile, told the committee last week not only that he had deleted relevant texts but that “I do not hold on to text messages for long periods in terms of data on my phone and so on.” This suggests that he has been destroying official records as a matter of routine. If so, this would be a clear breach of the National Archives Act.

The legal guidance to all agencies of government is that: “Destruction of all records is prohibited under the National Archives Act, 1986 7(1), unless permission is first granted by the Director of the National Archives, and a Certificate for the Disposal of Departmental Records issued.”

Why, with so little at stake, have senior Fine Gael Ministers apparently flouted the law?

Do Coveney (and other Ministers who seem to have been equally cavalier) have these certificates? Let us see them.

Why, with so little at stake, have senior Fine Gael Ministers (including the unnameable one who leaked it from the Cabinet) apparently flouted the law?

Simply because they could. Power corrupts, but it also stupefies. These Ministers have been in government now for 10 years. The privileges of office have become entitlements.

And entitled people, however smart, do stupid things. In the thin air of high political altitudes, they become light-headed with hauteur.

If cocaine is God’s way of telling you that you have too much money, the drug of arrogance is her way of telling everyone else that you’ve been in office too long.